Field Service Heroes: Working in ServiceMax Better & Faster [Salesforce Navigation]

Welcome to the second blog in this series, focusing on speeding up your navigation when using Salesforce.

These customizations aren't global changes for all users—they’re specific to your personal view in Salesforce Classic.

If you have any additional tips and tricks on this topic, please share your feedback in the comments!

Search for Records

To search, type a term into the search box at the top of any screen. The search feature suggests matches as you type. It prompts you to switch to a "starts with" search after you’ve entered two or more characters. To see a full list of search results, press enter, clickSearch, or click the option for "starts with" search.

Search is smart. It remembers which objects you've use and how often you use them. By default, what you search for most recently appears first.

You can refine/improve your search from the Search results page in the following ways.

To expand the search, add an asterisk (*) or question mark (?) to your search keywords.

To make your search more specific, use standard search operators like AND, OR, or AND NOT.

To limit the search to an exact phrase, clickOptionsand selectExact phrase, or enclose your search keywords in quotes.

To prioritize your results you can pin certain objects so they always show at the top. Contacts and Accounts are pinned in the screenshot below. Find out how in the Salesforce Classic video below at 0:55.

Select the object you want to customise from the drop-down menu, and clickCustomize Page.

You can then add and remove related lists (1), plus change the order of the related lists you see (2).

Sections on a Page

You have the ability to hide sections of the page layout. Once hidden they stay hidden on all records of that object until you expand them again.

Next to the section header click the triangle and it will collapse or expand that section. Making this change will speed up scrolling through a record, as well as help you focus on the information relevant to you.

Before:

After:

Keyboard Shortcuts

Hold Ctrl and then press F. This opens a search window top right of the page (depending on the browser you are using) and allows you to search for any text string on the whole page you are on, not just the bit you can see.

Salesforce fields that are underlined and hold values are lookup fields. An example is Case Number on a Work Order.

Salesforce fields that are underlined and hold values are lookup fields. An example is Case Number on a Work Order. When you click on this value, it takes you to a related record. If you hold the Ctrl key when you do this the related record opens in a new tab on your browser. If you hold the Shift Key instead it will be a new window.

One thing I have been dealing with since our organization has multiple Segments.....

When one Segment wants to make a change, it has to be approved by all. In one recent situation it was requested to add Sales Orders related list to our Accounts and IP page layouts. Since you can only have so many fields display on the related list we had to come to a compromise. What we did was add the most important then create a Custom Report Link for Sales Orders and add that to the layout for each object. Now the user can see the related sales orders for the IP and Account in the related list and then if they click the Custom Report Link they can display a filtered report in a new window with more details about all the associated Sales Orders. Its very nice because you can pass data from the record into a filter on the report. We started to now use this more and more.. Here is a tutorial I used to get me going.. How to leverage Custom Links to run a Report from any object | ShellBlack.com

Another area we used this filtered report was on the Product record. We created a report “Product Stock with Location”. We pass in the product code or part number into this report as a filter and the report can show us all the Locations (Technicians and Warehouses) that currently have this product.. You never know, it might be quicker to get a part from a neighboring Technician than from the Warehouse…

Hi Casey, thanks for sharing! With your challenges on related lists being used by multiple segments have you also looked at the hover functionality. When hovering over one of the items in a related list it shows a pop up with a number of fields available to view. While not exactly the same it does give access to more than just the 10 fields.

Regarding your Product search solution this sounds cool. We have built a radius search solution that looks for product stock by the distance it is from the Tech based on the last work order they marked themselves arrived at. It knows the location of the stock from the location record and does a calculation between the two to determine distance. I believe it works quite well and does indeed allow the Techs to get parts quickly from their team mates closer to them than the warehouse.

Global Business Systems Analyst
Working with Pitney Bowes and the ServiceMax solution since 2011. I have worked on deploying ServiceMax to Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Ireland, United Kingdom, Canada and the US. I have worked on support, business analysis, architectural reviews, design, requirements gathering, implementation, testing management etc.
I am a certified ServiceMax Advanced Administrator.
NB: Any views/suggestions/recommendations given on this community are my own and do not represent the views/ recommendations/suggestions of Pitney Bowes.